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  • Growing Pains, Healing Wounds

    Chapter by ellaguru · 09 Feb 2025
  • A father and his daughter rekindle their relationship.
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  • There once was a time when my father and I were inseperable. My mother died when I was really young, so I barely even remember her. Looking at an old photo of her does not conjure any feelings of warmth or familiarity. It feels more like I’m looking at a stranger.

    Ever since her death, my father has been raising me all by himself. He used to be a great dad; we basically did everything together. He also was super gentle, we were hugging and cuddling all the time. It was like we were superglued to each other. I especially loved the tickle fights we used to have when I was a child. By the end, my whole face would hurt from all the laughing.

    But things changed around the time I hit puberty. Most of it was your usual teenage rebellion. Like every kid my age I wanted to establish an identity separate from my parent. So I dyed my naturally blonde hair pitch-black and really got into the goth scene. I just loved everything about it: the music, the aesthetic, and how perfectly it expressed my innermost feelings at the time. I started wearing black eyeliner, black nailpolish, black lipstick—the whole nine yards. I even wore chockers basically twenty-four seven. No more bright pink colors, no more “Daddy’s little girl”. I ran as far away from that as I possibly could.

    This was also when my father started looking at me differently, which made me feel uneasy. And in response, I started looking at him differently. It seemed like he was not my rock anymore that I could hold onto when I felt most insecure. And as time went on he seemed to let himself go more and more. Maybe the grief of losing his wife, that he so bravely fought through initially, finally caught up to him. Eventually I came to see him as the normal, mortal man that he was. Gone was the halo surrounding the hero of my childhood. And gone was my knight in shiny armor protecting me from all the evil in the world.

    During most of my teenage years my chest was really flat. I dressed as provocatively as I could, trying to show off what I didn’t have, as I felt that it went hand-in-hand with being a goth. But as I got older, I mellowed a bit on that whole …
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